MONK BUSINESS: Protests in Myanmar.

Myanmar is a member of that small and luckless club of nations from which no good news ever comes. The impoverished Southeast Asian dictatorship formerly known as Burma is currently making headlines for the ongoing trial of Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, accused of violating her house arrest when an American imbecile named John Yettaw swam across a lake uninvited and visited her home in Yangon last month. That event serves as a reminder that for people living under a repressive regime, there’s always an indirect threat from those activists who, while trying to fight the government, drag not only themselves but those around them into danger. That same point is driven home, albeit unintentionally, by the makers of the new documentary Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country.

During mass protests in 2007 led by Buddhist monks, a group of underground Burmese video journalists, or VJs, filmed the uprising and the junta’s violent crackdown using hand-held cameras. The shaky footage, smuggled out and broadcast by Western media, was some of the only firsthand reporting of the protests in a country where foreign journalists are banned. Danish director Anders Østergaard has shaped that footage into the 85-minute Burma VJ, leaving the reporters’ own considerable courage as the central theme. The mood of hope they capture during the protests, and the ensuing brutality they document, is deeply moving—and made more so by the voice of the narrator, a Burmese journalist forced to flee the country who directs the team from neighboring Thailand.

In Myanmar the mere act of trying to report political news becomes, in itself, a political act. The ruling generals survive by suppressing information—to release news unfiltered is to directly undermine them. The ideal of objective journalism is gone as soon as the camera starts rolling. But the VJs further cross that line when they urge the monks to call on the public to join the protests. The reporters position themselves at the head of the march, guiding a route to pull in the most people. Meanwhile, they talk among themselves about the certainty of eventual violence. “People have to get arrested. They have to die. Monks, too,” the narrator says in a phone call to Myanmar. And, inevitably, they do. Whether those deaths will make any difference to Myanmar’s sad fortunes is left to history, not reporters, to decide.